John Francis Mauceri (born September 12, 1945) is an American conductor, composer, author, and educator whose work has focused on orchestral music, opera, Broadway, and film-related repertoire. A graduate of Yale University, where he later taught music for more than a decade, he has conducted the major orchestras and opera companies in the world, including the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, the Royal Opera House (Covent Garden), the Deutsche Oper Berlin, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, Cleveland Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, the National Symphony (Washington), Philadelphia Orchestra, Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien (Vienna), San Francisco Symphony, Tokyo Philharmonic, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. He has won a Tony, Grammy, and three Emmy awards, as well as an Olivier Award. Further, he conducted the Oscar–winning music for the soundtrack of the film version of Evita. As a founder and educator, he created and directed the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and was founding chancellor of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He is the author of several books on conducting and the history of 20th-century music.
Early career and education Born in New York City, Mauceri attended East Meadow High School on Long Island"Class of 2018 Honored for Academic Excellence". East Meadow Schools. Accessed July 7, 2022. and studied music theory and composition at Yale University earning a BA in 1967 and a Master of Philosophy in music theory in 1972. His teachers included William G. Waite, Claude V. Palisca, Beekman Cannon, Leon Plantinga, and Robert Bailey in musicology; Mel Powell, Donald Martino, Allen Forte and Peter Sculthorpe in theory and composition; Donald Currier in piano; and Gustav Meier in conducting. In addition he studied 20th-century architecture with Vincent Scully, French literature with Henri Peyre, religion (Pelikan and Kuttner) and psychology (Logan and Childe).
Accepted with a full scholarship into Yale's Graduate School in music theory, he was soon appointed to the faculty as music director of the Yale Symphony Orchestra (1968–1974) and continued on for a total of fifteen years as both a guest conductor and music director of the opera program at the Yale School of Music. Mauceri is credited for building the Yale Symphony Orchestra into one of the most respected student orchestras in the world. During his tenure with the YSO he brought the orchestra to Paris (Théâtre des Champs-Élysées) for Paris premieres of Ives's Symphony No. 4, Debussy's Khamma and Scriabin's Prométhée. He produced and conducted the YSO for the European premiere of Leonard Bernstein's Mass in Vienna (broadcast worldwide on PBS, BBC and the ORF), the world premiere of Charles Ives's Three Places in New England in its original, large orchestra version, as well as the world premiere of the critical edition of Ives's Orchestral Set No. 2. His programs drew capacity audiences for seven years and included the American premiere of Debussy's 1913 ballet Khamma, the American premiere of Strauss's silent film (1926) of Der Rosenkavalier, the world premiere of a completely staged pageant-version of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Hymnen involving 1000 performers on Yale's Cross Campus, the American premiere of Hindemith's orchestrated songs Das Marienleben and rare performances of Scriabin's Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (with coordinated lasers), John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis, Wagner's Das Rheingold, Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder, Messiaen's Réveil des oiseaux and Stravinsky's Agon.
In 1973, Mauceri made both his professional orchestral debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and his operatic debut conducting Menotti's The Saint of Bleecker Street at the Wolf Trap Festival.
Music championed Committed to preserving two American art forms, the Broadway musical, and Hollywood film scores, he has edited and performed many restorations and first performances, including a full restoration of the original 1943 production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, performing editions of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Girl Crazy and Strike up the Band, Bernstein's Candide and A Quiet Place, and film scores by Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, Danny Elfman and Howard Shore. As one of two conductors in Decca Records' award-winning series Entartete Musik, Mauceri made a number of historic first recordings of music banned by the Nazis as degenerate music. The intersection of the "degenerate composers" of Europe and the refugee composers of Hollywood is the subject of much of his research and his writings. In addition, Mauceri has conducted significant premieres of works by Verdi, Debussy, Hindemith, Ives, Stockhausen, and Weill.
Work in musical theatre Mauceri made his Broadway debut on March 10, 1974, as music director of Hal Prince's production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide which had begun as a limited run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This version of the show was given a Special Tony Award for "The Advancement of the American Musical Theatre". He subsequently served as music director for the "Opera House" version of Candide (providing additional orchestrations and supervising the placement of the music within the text of Hugh Wheeler's book) that premiered at the New York City Opera in 1982. Its 1986 recording won Mauceri a Grammy for "Best Opera Recording". In 1988, as Music Director of Scottish Opera, Mauceri initiated a third version based on a reading of Voltaire adapted by John Wells and directed by Jonathan Miller. Mauceri was able to make use of virtually all the music Bernstein had composed for various versions of Candide between 1956 and 1971. This final version had its world premiere at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, with Bernstein in attendance, and broadcast on BBC television. It was transferred to the Sadler's Wells Theatre in London where it won the 1988 Olivier Award as "Musical of the Year." Bernstein subsequently recorded this version in London, and it won him a posthumous Grammy for "Best Classical Album" of 1990.
Mauceri took a leadership role in reevaluating the American musical theater in his historically informed performances and recordings of classic American musicals, such as the Gershwins' 1930 score to Girl Crazy (Elektra Nonesuch 9 79250-2) in 1990 (winner of the Edison Klassiek Award), both the 1927 and 1930 versions of the Gershwins' Strike Up the Band (1991 – Elektra Nonesuch 79273-2 and PS Classics PS-1100 respectively) and most importantly On Your Toes (1936) by Rodgers and Hart which he initiated and co-produced in 1983. Mauceri, representing the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, hired George Abbott (then 96 years old), George Balanchine (his last assignment) and found the original orchestrator, Hans Spialek, to restore the score. On Your Toes ran 505 performances on Broadway and marked the first time a musical from the 1930s was seen and heard on Broadway with its original musical elements intact in over a generation. Its cast album, conducted by Mauceri, is the first fully digital Broadway cast album (TER Limited: CDTER 1063). The show was nominated for five Antoinette Perry ("Tony") Awards and won two: for Best Revival of a Musical and Best Actress in a Musical (Natalia Makarova). In addition, On Your Toes won four Drama Desk Awards (Outstanding Revival; Outstanding Actress in a Musical; Outstanding Director of a Musical; Outstanding Orchestrations). As a result of its success, the received wisdom of rewriting old musicals and adding new orchestrations and hit songs from other shows was challenged and has led to a proliferation of organizations that present classic American musicals with their original scores restored as written, though these performances are generally in a semi-staged format.
Andrew Lloyd Webber attended a performance of La bohème at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in the winter of 1984 that was conducted by Mauceri and as a result invited him to be the musical supervisor of the Broadway production of his Song and Dance, which opened on September 18, 1985, and received eight Tony Award nominations, and one win for Bernadette Peters. In October 1995, after the first recording session for the soundtrack to Evita failed, "Andrew ... suggested we bring in the celebrated American conductor John Mauceri. ... By the end of the week, the maestro Mauceri had performed his magic with a brilliant catchment of the finest orchestral players in London and all thoughts of Black Monday were forgotten." As gratitude for his work on the film, Mauceri was given something unheard of in film—a full screen credit, even though he had no contract for any billing whatsoever.
Mauceri led the charge in reassessing the American works of Kurt Weill, which had been generally viewed as inferior to his German works. In 1978, he conducted Weill's 1947 opera Street Scene at the New York City Opera, which was so successful, it was broadcast in the subsequent season on PBS' Live from Lincoln Center. Beginning with Weill's Lady in the Dark at the Edinburgh Festival in 1988, and followed by the first professional production of Street Scene in the UK,"Sugaring the Pill: Kurt Weill on Broadway", Opera, May 1989 Mauceri argued that the American works were equal to and continued directly out of the German works. His recording of Street Scene (Decca 433 371–2) released in 1991, is the first complete recording of any American theater work of Kurt Weill. Mauceri brought Street Scene for its country premieres in Portugal (Lisbon Opera), and Italy (Teatro Regio, Turin). In addition, he brought Weill's music back to Berlin, where it had been mostly forgotten. Two recordings with Ute Lemper (Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill Volumes 1 and 2) represented Weill's music with texts in German, French and English, demonstrating the composer's continuity of style and ideas. In addition, his Berlin recordings include Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins () with Lemper, the Little Mahagonny (Mahagonny-Songspiel) and the first German language recording of The Threepenny Opera () made in over forty years (Decca 430 075-2 LH) released in 1989. In 2000, he led a series of performances of Kurt Weill's 1933 bible play, The Eternal Road () in which he and musicologist Ed Harsh restored the complete score which had never been heard with its complete fourth act and never in Europe. These performances were co-productions of the New Israeli Opera, the Chemnitz Opera in Germany and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The work was performed in its original German text by fellow refugee Franz Werfel and televised in Europe from its Chemnitz performances. In 2001, Mauceri led the world premiere recording of Weill's early operatic success, Der Protagonist from 1926 (Capriccio 60 086) which was also broadcast on German radio in a concert performance in the Berliner Philharmonie.
Work in opera